Tag: Management

So This Is Christmas?

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English: Coaching process model (GROW model) P...

English: Coaching process model (GROW model) Polski: Model procesu coachingowego (GROW model) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although it is the week before Christmas, seasonal goodwill seems thin on the ground.

Obvious tragedy and strife aside, it is the personal stresses which can make the world seem especially grim.

For instance, the Guardian’s ‘Work’ section features the case study of a senior manager whose skills and successes cut no ice with his senior colleague.

Top management are blaming the woes of the larger business on the senior manager.  His previous good leadership of his business unit goes unrecognised.

Above the line, the article describes the chilling effect of the blame game.  The senior manager is left feeling his confidence ebbing away.  He feels trapped, and is facing a six month count-down to termination (he is suddenly performing ‘unacceptably’ in the larger organisational context).

That is a bleak way to end 2012.

It is an eye-opener to read some of the reader feedback, offered to the senior manager, below the line.  Some of it seems defensive.  Some of it aggressive.  My take on what he could do next is, inevitably, coaching themed.

You can read the article and comments (mine are included as RogerAD) here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/work-blog/2012/dec/17/should-i-leave-my-job

Basically, I am saying he should find himself a coach and allow himself to be supported through the GROW model:

Identifying a goal – determining what is the positive benefit he wants to head toward, in the time he has available?

Reflecting on his reality – questioning what does the relationship between his values and those of his organisation feel like?

Listing his options – working out what are the steps that take him forward, toward his ultimate goal?

Using his will – relying on the reserve of positive energy he holds – that his caused him to seek a solution to his dilemma – to identify the first step he can immediately take.  That is the step which will move him one step closer to what he wants.

It will be interesting to see what type of feedback he chooses to follow.  Whatever he decides to do, you have to hope his 2013 turns out better than 2012 has.

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How Full Is Your Bucket?

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Cover of "Understanding Psychological Con...

Cover via Amazon

In my experience some people resist change in their professional lives, even if they are unhappy.  They don’t want to benefit from taking on a new way of thinking, after a change to their circumstances.  Or they may feel that ‘at their time of life’ change is not possible and they have to put up with bad situations.

I think those people may be missing out.  That is especially true if the person is in a junior job role and change has happened around them, meaning their expectations about their working environment – personal development; pay rises; job security – are not being met.  This is true in the private sector and, the Daily Telegraph’s Jobs Editor Louisa Peacock suggests, amongst civil servants.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/9630531/Whitehall-jobs-down-30000-on-year-amid-rock-bottom-staff-morale.html

Hopefully senior managers already have, or are actively being coached to develop strategies to counteract the dip in staff morale that results from unmet expectations.

For senior managers who don’t see why action is necessary (or believe staff will put up with just about anything) Neil Conway and Rob Briner’s 2005 analysis ‘Understanding Psychological Contracts at Work’, includes the telling observation:

“When an employee believes that [their] organisation has failed to deliver its promises on a regular basis, he or she will question whether it makes sense to continue contributing to that organisation or whether it might be better to move on to another”.

The new look People Management magazine this month includes a feature on ‘Eight Ways To Reward Staff, Without Giving Them A Pay Rise’.  I like the simplicity of their final suggestion: try to say ‘thank you’ to others for their contribution.  The article suggests literally writing notes of appreciation and leaving them with colleagues who have done a good job (I can remember from personal experience how a simple act of appreciation can put a smile on someone’s face).

The magazine says this concrete expression of gratitude is an echo of Tom Rath’s and Donald O Clifton’s approach to combatting workplace negativity, set out in their book, ‘How full is your bucket?’.   I like the idea and I am going to try it out the next chance I get.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Full-Your-Bucket-Positive-Strategies/dp/1595620036

GROWing Pains

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English: An artist's depiction of the rat race...

English: An artist’s depiction of the rat race in reference to the work and life balance. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_race Made with following images: http://www.openclipart.org/detail/75385 http://www.openclipart.org/detail/74137 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve received some useful performance coaching recently, to help me successfully suggest how the future contributions of a voluntary project group I belong to could be improved, improving my work-life balance.

It was good quality coaching, following the GROW – Goal, Reality, Options, and Will – formula championed by Sir John Whitmore amongst others.  It left me holding a clear set of actions for two, cards-on-the-table, meetings about the project.  I was going to influence greater participation from group at the first, grass roots meeting.  I was then going to suggest changes to the project vision in the second high-level event.

Of course reality doesn’t work like that.  In the first meeting no one wanted to participate more than they were already doing.  In the second meeting the request for help with the vision went up the line, and came firmly back down again.   The issue with the vision thing was ours to address, not anyone else’s.

Which goes to show that, where you can coach with improvements in your own performance in mind, you cannot expect your actions to produce specific outcomes in others.  After all, others haven’t been coached to ‘participate more’ or to ‘change their vision’.

All this possibly means my next coaching goal may have to be: ‘to successfully document my contribution to the outcomes of this project, so I can use my skills in another context  this year’.

(More information about Sir John Whitmore is  available on this website http://www.performanceconsultants.com/ )

Back to Reality

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When is the ideal time to learn something new?  Put another way, when is there ever a quiet few months in which to tackle personal development goals?  I doubt there ever will be an ‘ideal’ or ‘quiet’ time, since the stack of competing claims on our time is increasing daily.  It might take a very long time to roll the dice correctly to earn permission to start.

Two dice

Make a choice, don’t leave development to luck

 

There’s also always the risk that some senior colleagues view that time as time spent being unproductive.

I vividly recall saying as much to a colleague whom I mentored.  His aspiration was to earn a promotion from his entry level management role to the next management grade.

I encouraged him to look at the common attributes called for in the roles he wanted to hold.  I supported him in identifying voluntary opportunities in his current role that he could exploit, to demonstrate his potential.  We came up with a twelve month development timetable he could follow, to gradually build up his skills portfolio.  His goal was to be at the front of the promotion pack one year hence.  Then reality intervened.

Somehow my mentee’s line manager never got around to creating the space for his wider potential to be demonstrated.  Perhaps that manager liked the results he was getting from my mentee and thought my mentee was happy staying in that role.  Inevitably that line manager then left.

Their successor needed to focus on maintaining results, not developing people.

An internal re-organisation followed.

Before the dust settled the ideal time for development had passed.

If there is a lesson to take away from this example, it may be this.  However difficult the reality, the ideal time for development may just be ‘now’.

Why Blog about Self-Development?

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I am fascinated by people’s ability to Learn, Change and Grow in their professional or personal lives, once they have set their mind to it.

My management career started in the 1990s.  Over the following two decades I was privileged to help colleagues, who wanted to change, do so.

It was great to help them work out what learning opportunities existed and how they could make the most of them.  It was a definite Win-Win situation: colleagues got to grow personally and professionally; the organisation benefitted from their growth.

I found it incredibly positive to play a part in helping others achieve better results.  There are a number of strategies which can produce that result.

I recognise that increasingly Coaching and Mentoring, as well as good support from their management can all help people embrace change.  I’ll reflect on those areas and others in this blog.